Calendar Man – Week of 11/4

This week brings the release of Call of Duty: Ghosts, the last big release before Microsoft and Sony trot our their consoles and start massaging numbers to declare who “won” the holiday season. I like the above CoD commercial however for it to be realistic, one of them has to be a twelve year old racist, one has to be doing nothing but tea bagging a dead soldier, two of them have to aggressively sexually harass Megan Fox and none of them are work together.

4 thoughts on “Calendar Man – Week of 11/4”

I’m wrapping up the last section of Wind Waker; damn that game holds up so well. I may have to go back to Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess after I am done.

And Pokemon is on back burner to the delightful Phoenix Wright. The newer graphics, improved systems, and slick writing make it my favorite since the first one so far. I hope it stays this good. Impressively long game too, and the cases are quite interesting.

This weekend was the Extra Life charity marathon, encouraging gamers to livestream their 25-hour game binges to promote donations to children’s medical centers. The donation site was victim of four separate DDoS attacks which crippled its ability to accept payments from people who wanted to donate. To children’s hospitals. Really, I just don’t have any words.

In less soul-withering news, I finally finished Assassin’s Creed III. It’s hard to properly critique the terribleness of the story in the shadow of that first paragraph, but seriously, it’s kind of astounding the game was allowed to release in this state. It’s like clumps of the script were ripped out randomly, without any attempt to stitch the ragged edges together and explain how Connor came upon this crucial piece of information, where that major character vanished off to, or why pivotal plot developments are seemingly forgotten in the span of a scene change.

Mechanically, I think AC3 is the best the series has ever been. Traversal, combat, assassin management, character upgrades, and the world economy are all markedly improved from the missteps of Revelations, and the naval combat was a *wonderful* addition.

The trouble is that once all those individual elements were slotted into place, the mission designers who were supposed to blend them into a good game had absolutely no idea how to do their jobs. The game opens with about three hours of letting you murder fools like a Revolutionary-era James Bond…then transitions into about five hours of unskippable tutorials on various methods for skinning a hare. If you wanted me to care about your meticulously designed system of randomly spawning wildlife, game, that is the wrong way to go about it.

Still, I will be looking forward to the PC release of Assassin’s Creed IV, acquired for free with the purchase of my awesome new video card (through the No High Scores Amazon app!) Ubisoft has been surprisingly responsive to fan feedback over the years, and if they can leverage everything they learned through making AC3 and improve on all the things that didn’t work, that next game has the potential to surpass Brotherhood.

I can’t decide if AC3 is as bad as the original AC. It certainly didn’t help that they ditched the game’s most interesting character for a protagonist with all of the charm of an oak barrel about three hours into the game.